Student Question
How are the ways Gregor in The Metamorphosis is trapped similar to the characters in Poe's stories?
Quick answer:
This response provides a nice discussion of how Kafka's and Poe's characters are trapped by various circumstances, with an emphasis on family, society, mental state, and work. The response focuses on the elements of the tales that feed the reader's imagination and are ripe for comparison in "nightmare worlds." The critic also brings up many important points about how Kafka may have felt entrapped by his father and by anti-Semitic feeling in Prague.
This question inspires an interesting discussion of entrapment in Kafka's The Metamorphosis and stories by Poe like "The Cask of Amontillado" and "The Tell-Tale Heart."
Many scholars identify autobiographical elements in The Metamorphosis, which suggests that Kafka himself may have felt trapped by certain constraints in his own life. Kafka was a German Jew living with anti-Semitic feeling in his hometown of Prague, and he was also under serious pressure from his father, throughout his adult life, to go into business.
Kafka's feelings of being trapped by circumstances out of his control parallel those of Gregor's. A great example of this situation takes place at the beginning when Gregor, horrifyingly, wakes up as a cockroach and learns that he is late for work; his family is upset with him for being casual with his obligations, which could represent Kafka's father's desire for Kafka to go into a different profession. In...
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fact, Gregor's father's behavior and his severe treatment of Gregor-as-cockroach may reflect how Kafka felt a lot of time when he was with his family: misunderstood and beaten down, an emotional nightmare for a sensitive artistic soul like Kafka's.
Poe's stories of "The Cask of Amontillado" and "The Tell-Tale Heart" demonstrate a similar kind of nightmare, one in which two characters, like Gregor, are trapped in circumstances beyond their control. In "The Cask of Amontillado," Montresor uses Fortunato's greed, his appetite for Amontillado, and his eventual drunkenness to lead Fortunato into a trap: that of the catacombs. These catacombs become Fortunato's tomb, as Montresor builds up a wall so that Fortunato is unable to escape. The physical experience of being trapped by walls parallels Gregor's physical experience of being trapped by a cockroach's exoskeleton.
In "The Tell-Tale Heart," the murdererer-narrator is entrapped by his own disintegrating mental state, much like Gregor is entrapped by his own alienation. This can be understood literally, as a cockroach, and figuratively, as a Jewish artist trying to live his own life in a society critical of him. Poe's narrator cannot escape his suspicion that his murder victim lives on under the floorboards where the narrator buried him, and this paranoia wins in the end. The narrator desires freedom from the trap of his own making, and with a shout at the end of the story, he confesses to his crime. Ironically, this event will inevitably lead him to another kind of trap, that of prison or death, but he is mercifully released from his own fear of being caught. Gregor's death in The Metamorphosis contains a similar sense of relief from his experience of being trapped.
Both Poe and Kafka trigger the reader's imaginations with horrifying situations that give the reader reason to ask him or herself, "What would I do if I were trapped by these circumstances?" Perhaps the reader would also find death a relief, an emotional state which is a nightmare in it and of itself.